Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender Resource Center

Intersex / Disorders of Sex Development

Why does the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender Resource Center have a resource page about intersex identity and issues? Because people looking for information on this subject sometimes come to the Office.

This keynote speech presented by Emi Koyama at the Translating Identity Conference in 2006 does a very good job of discussing the change in terminology from "intersex" to "disorders of sex development" (DSD) that is taking place, and also addresses the question of whether 'I' belongs in the same sentence with LBG & T.

• DSD Guidelines
• Intersex Society of North America (archive site)
• Intersex Initiative

Office resources

Available to be checked out.

• Videos:
  • Hermaphrodites Speak! "meet Angela, David, Heidi, Tom, Mani, Cheryl, Max and Hida as they tell their stories of growing up intersexed," (ISNA) VHS
  • Yellow for Hermaphrodites: Mani's Story, traces the life of the intersex activist Mani Mitchell, from Hermaphrodites Speak! (ISNA) DVD
  • Intersex: Redefining Sex, a half-hour documentary on medical management of children with ambiguous sex anatomy (ISNA) VHS
• Other:
  • A Human Rights Investigation into the Medical "Normalization" of Intersex People, a report of a public hearing by the Human Rights Commission of the City & County of San Francisco
  • Teaching Intersex Issues, ISNA speaker's handbook

"We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." – Edward Sapir, 1956 (this is what is known as the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).